2021-08-10 Cults, Disinformation, and the Undermining of Democracy

12:48AM Aug 11, 2021

Speakers:

John Werner

Alison Sander

Kunal Sood

John Werner

Steven Hassan

David Troy

Spencer Schneider

Pamela Meyer

Anne Nelson

Keywords:

cult

spencer

point

network

question

people

group

dave

trump

book

disinformation

state

media

great

pam

happening

democracy

country

helped

create

Trees and driving the action that will power our futures. These are some of the most successful creative minds. And tonight, we live in an era of disinformation and deep desire for community. Tonight you'll hear from insiders about how the desire for connection can form the basis of cults, pockets of extreme thinking and manipulation on a scale that will astonish what draws people into cults. How can you recognize the cold or cold and extreme thinking on the rise? How do these dynamics play out on a national scale and influence civil society, tonight will be a very rich session, starting with Colts, then the power of disinformation. And as some of our speakers maintain a coke that now involves much of the country and threatens to undermine democracy. You know, I back founders and startups and people think of startups is like tech founders. But our country is founded by a bunch of legal minds that created a constitution put things in motion. And I think some of that may be in jeopardy. And we're going to talk about what the state of affairs are and what needs to be done and can be done. I'd like to introduce Corey who will play like a 92nd opening to celebrate tonight. Cory is the world champion on multiple continents of the accordion. He also set the world record 32 hours and 14 minutes playing the accordion. He designed his own accordion, he is one of our imaginators. And he's also our musician in residence. And he'll play at the 45 mark a few times throughout the show. But Cory, what do you have for us to kick this important show off? I thought I'd play maybe the rainbow connection. I think some people might know that is remote connection.

Great. Thank you, Cory. Welcome, everyone. I also want to thank Allison. Allison, is, you know, just a wonderful soul and has been a great partner and in facilitating moderating these shows. Looking forward to tonight, Alison, you looking forward to tonight before I introduce our speakers?

Absolutely, john, I think this is gonna be a really rich show, but also tied together a lot of the strands that we're all watching in the media these days. So can't wait.

Great. So let me briefly introduce our speakers. There's Pamela Meyer, renowned expert on deception. She's arming people with tools that can help take back the truth. She's author of the best selling book, lie spotting. She is known as the nation's best known expert on deception. She gave a TED talk how to spot a liar in 2011. That is been viewed by as been viewed 32 million times. It's the 15th most TED talk I was I was there in the audience when she gave it. She's the CEO of collaborate. She trains private and public sector professionals in verbal and nonverbal cues. She's a certified fraud examiner. And if you look at her background, she had done a number of things in media. So while she's an expert in in deception, she's had a great career in the media world and it's sort of decided that she wanted to have an impact on on on this this area, and we're proud to have you Dave Troy, longtime friend, really, really proud to have you on this. An award winning writer entrepreneur conceptual digital artists. He has stuff in the MoMA background is in computer science and history. He was the first person to use Twitter's API in 2007, which led to two projects that tell a story about Baltimore, where he's from and other cities. He's been analyzing social networks in the context of cities. He's tracked disinformation campaigns and helped make it accessible to millions. He's developed a framework for identifying and interrupting disinformation operations. excited to hear what you have to say tonight. Then, want to introduce Steve Hasson, an expert on undue influence brainwashing and unethical hypothesis. hypnosis, not hypothesis. I'm thinking my my grade school days. He's the author of the best selling book, conveying cult mind control. He's a licensed mental health professional, I think a recent we heard it a PhD are in the process from Harvard Medical. He's the founding director of the freedom of mind Resource Center. And his recent book is the cult of Trump. Thank you, Steven for being here. And he'll get into it. But he was in a cult and can talk about how we got in and how we got out. Anne Nelson. We have two final guests I want to introduce author and lecturer fields of International Affairs media and human rights journalist is covered in conflicts in El Salvador in Guatemala, won the award for Best International reporting from the Philippines. She served as the director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. She became the director of the international program at the Columbia School of Journalism. She created the first curriculum and human rights reporting. She's teaching at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, which I think is the first school of that kind. And she's written many books, read orchestra.

Suzanne has children, a daring rescue and Nazi parents. And I know she's coming out with a new book and we're really excited for her to share some of our findings that are going to be in this new book. And she's a multi person fellow a Guggenheim fellow, Bellagio fellow, I don't know if I said that right. And a Schwartzman fellow, very, very accomplished. Journalist. So thank you for being here. And finally, Spencer Snyder, been practicing corporate litigation for over 35 years. In 1989, when he was a bored, overworked and lonely 29 year old associate from one of the biggest New York City law firms. He was invited to attend a meeting of an esoteric school. They're saying about an arranged marriage and years of systematic abuse. He managed to escape being in this this form of a cult in 2012. And he's writing the book, Manhattan cold story 23 years and sign an ultra secret Cult of the elite and that book is coming out. And so we have two people who have books coming out. We have a bunch of authors and journalists and a lot of people who really care about some of the things we're going to talk about before asked the first question, Allison, anything you want to do to kind of frame tonight? Or should I just keep going? I think it sounds great. Let's launch in. Great. So tonight will be a very rich session, starting with Colts the power of different information. And some of our speakers maintain a cold the now involve much of the country and threatens to undermine democracy. We're going to start with Steve Hassan and Alison, I will go back and forth on asking questions. I'm gonna ask the first question, Steve, as a mental health professional, who has spent 40 years helping people get out of cults help us to understand what is a cult? Does it have to involve mind control and brainwashing?

Thanks for having me on this. It's exciting and an honor. So my framework is to think about influence on a continuum from do influence or ethical influence to unethical influence. And so my concerns are with authoritarian cults that lie when they're recruiting and isolate people from family and friends and indoctrinate people into a pseudo identity that's dependent and obedient to the cult leader or ideology. And in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. It's listed as a dissociative disorder. In other words, when I was recruited into our friend group of the moonies in 1974. My girlfriend had dumped me and three women flirted with me in Queens College cafeteria. I was not looking to join a group but a girlfriend Yes. And when I asked during the conversation, are you part of a religious group? They said, Oh, no, not at all. And so they infringed on my religious freedom by that. So the the point about cults that I want to really drill down is that for me and why I did enter into a doctoral program in my 60s, was because I was encouraged at the program in psychiatry in the law at Harvard Medical School, that if I wanted to update the legal systems understanding of undue influence, I needed to go do scientific study on my bite model of authoritarian control, and get a PhD, so I could be an expert witness and people would take me more seriously. So I did complete that, john, in December of last year.

Steve, this is Alison, that is so fascinating. And it's interesting to think that a cult can show up in the form of several girlfriends. But can you help us given all your work in the field to understand a little bit more about the range and different types of cults? Because I think lots of us have a stereotype that probably isn't as broad as you're thinking. I mean, does it include religious cults, terrorist cults like ISIS? commercial cults, including things like human trafficking, and how do you track all the different types of colds? What do you see that they have in common?

Great question. So yes, so my orientation is psychological primarily and behavioral, as opposed to some eq coltdexperts, who are sociologists or their religious studies majors. I got interested in this field because of my deprogramming from the moonies where I became a right wing fascist, and cut off from my family and actually fasted for Richard Nixon, on the Capitol stairs, because God wanted Nixon to be president. But over the decades that I've been doing my work, I've helped everything from a one on one cult, where someone is a malignant narcissist, completely dominating and controlling another person to a dictatorship and a country. And the critical elements are controlling people's behavior, controlling their information, controlling their thoughts and controlling them emotionally to create this new pseudo identity. So in my work, I've helped people in commercial cults like multi level marketing cults, as well as sex and labor trafficking. I've helped people involved with psychotherapy, abuse cults, coaching cults, religious cults, political cults, large group awareness, training cults, and then plain old, unethical hypnosis, where somebody doesn't even realize someone's using covert methods to take over their mind and their body, and in some cases, rape them.

Steve, thank you for sharing that. Can you tell us a bit more about your own two and a half year experience with the moon Colt?

And your time there? What Lord you when you kind of mentioned a little bit? And what did it take to get out? So now you're a PhD from Harvard, but you know, back in the day, you were a Mooney? Yeah, actually, by heart. My my doctorate john is from fielding Graduate University. It's the forensic think tank that I'm a part of, at Harvard. But um, so I was a creative writing major. I grew up in a middle class, conservative Jewish family, I should say, 1.3 miles from Donald Trump's childhood home in Queens. And I was interested in writing poetry and short stories and not politics and not wanting to change anything about my life, I was pretty happy. However, the situational vulnerability, which turns out to be a universal, that all human beings experience, like, you know, breaking up in a relationship death of a loved one. graduating, losing a job, moving to a new city, state or country makes people more vulnerable. So in my case, there was just a lot of deception, a lot of manipulation and a number of events that led me to a Mooney workshop in Tarrytown, New York. And they tried to pressure me to stay for the seven day workshop, but I rebelled and I went home, but my family didn't know what

What's going on with me? And my mother said, Let's go talk to the rabbi. And the rabbi was clueless. But they had gotten inside of my head to the point where I was curious, is it possible that God has sent someone on earth to save all of us and that we can get rid of war and crime and poverty, and help everybody live together in peace. So it was this curiosity and the fact that the members were so bright, talented, sincere looking convincing, that made me go, Ah, this is probably a crock. But let me check it out a little bit more. And within a period of two weeks, they were had convinced me to drop out of college, quit my job, donate my bank account, and move into the movie Mooney center, and eventually cut off from my family and friends. And I became a right wing fascist, I came to believe the Holocaust was necessary, even though I was in Israel on an archeological dig in the Negev desert. When I was 18.

I like I said, I believe that Nixon needed to be president despite Watergate because God said so because I came to believe that moon was the Messiah, the greatest man in human history. And so I was sleeping about three to four hours a night, seven days a week, recruiting, making money doing political events for the cult, and I was made a leader, I attended many leadership meetings with moon directly. And the plan was to take over America because democracy was satanic, and infiltrate Congress and take over the banking system, the educational system, the media, and they eventually went and bought the washington times. So they bought the Washington star and turned it into the washington times.

And I got out john and Allison and everybody, because essentially, I fell asleep at the wheel of a minivan due to sleep deprivation drove into the back of a tractor trailer truck at 80 miles an hour. And when I was rescued, was in a hospital for several weeks away from the group, sleeping and eating. And it was in that context that I reached out to my sister Thea, who I was always very close with and was the one person in my entire world that didn't say I was an occult, didn't say, I was brainwashed. She just said I love you, and I don't understand helped me understand. And I reached out to her from the hospital and she said, Come and visit, you have a nephew, you haven't met. And I basically loved her love her. She's still alive. And I said, I'm a leader. So if you promise not to tell the parents, I can get I can arrange a visit. And fortunately, she did break her promise and told my parents and they arranged to hire a bunch of x moonies to do a deprogramming. And it started in voluntarily. And on day two, I agreed to spend four more days, because I was so convinced I wasn't brainwashed. And I wanted to prove it to my family. And so I agreed, and they listened for four more days, at which point I had a snapping experience where I realized moon was a liar. And if moon was a liar, that meant he was untrustworthy. He also meant he couldn't be a man of God. So at that point, my my critical thinking clicked in and I just started crying. Because I invested so much of my energy and my passion, my hopes, my dreams, in the unification organization. And what's so upsetting to me right now is the cult continues its political influence and infiltration. And Sean moon had a lot of people at the January 6 insurrection attempt and the guy has a crown of golden bullets and his training creating a crew training facility in Waco, Texas to teach people how to kill with rifles and ar fifteens. So I'm very upset and people need to understand the nature of how dangerous this organization is, and they should be in the news all the time along with the oathkeepers and the other groups that have been focused on for the Violent insurrection of hurt.

Steve, what an incredible story and thank you for your courage and sharing that I don't know how many other people have been through what you've been through and managed to get out to the other side. But I'd love to understand a little bit more from you. I mean, how would any of us know if we're under mind control? Like, what are the signals of that? And then you do so much help with the programming? What are the steps that are involved? You mentioned, you know, the four days with people but what how do you break the hypnosis?

Wow. Okay, so um, that was two different questions. The first one remind me because I was formulating an answer. And then you asked me,

the first the first one was how Would any of us know if we're under mind control

is great that that is the multi million dollar question. And I ask it in almost all my my talks, because everybody tends to miss understand and blame the victim and think that people have to be stupid, or something defective with them to ever get into an authoritarian cult. And it's just not it's just not the case. Very briefly, the formula I've come up with, and I should also add that my first book combating cult mind control, just reading it has helped more people exit cults since it came out than any of my efforts or anything else, because the moonies were really well known for the mass weddings and and how crazy the group was. And so people in a cult would read the book about the moonies and then realize, Oh, my God just pertains everything to me, because the behaviors are so similar. But to answer your question, specifically, here's the formula that I've come up with one you need to disengage from the environment and the influences in it. So take a timeout, take a vacation, turn off your phone, get away, sleep, eat, walk in nature, just unplug. Second study models of mind control. And the ones that helped me were Robert liftin, who wrote the 1961 book thought reform in the psychology of totalism, which was focused on Chinese communist brainwashing programs of now. Study his model Margaret singers six conditions model she was an army psychologist studying Chinese brainwashing my model, which is the bite model of authoritarian control, which I mentioned before controlling behavior, information, thoughts and emotions, and there's a laundry list of variables and they're all on my freedom of mind comm website I might add under learn about undue influence. And then seek out deliberately seek out critics and former members because part of mind control is teaching people. Don't listen to fake news. Don't listen to the past states or the former members, they're evil. If you really want to know if you're under mind control or not, seek out the critics seek out the former members the best you can find and listen to why they're critical and why they left after being a committed member, then honestly reflect back to when you were first approached, or you were first induced into one of the programs or manipulations of the call. What did you think you were getting into? Like because deception is so universal in authoritarian cults, you have to step back go back in time, and I remembered the women said this is not a religious group. And then within two weeks, I was bowing to an altar with moons picture on it, reciting a pledge to fight for my life to save Korea, the Fatherland, think back and then analyze using the models of mind control. Does it fit or doesn't it fit? Is the credit critiques and the negative information valid, the credible and does it resonate with your own experience? And having done that process, people wake up and go, this isn't what I thought I was getting into. And then they start listening to more Former members and Studying the parallels with other cults.

So I might also add, learning about a different cult than the one you were in is the Achilles heel of authoritarian cults. So for me studying Chinese communist brainwashing, that's why I was so open to learning. These days people are learning about Scientology. They're learning about the trafficking cult of Nexium, Keith Ranieri was convicted of trafficking and his sentence 220 years in jail, there are good documentaries on that group and other cults start learning about other cults because it will resonate if you are in a destructive cult.

Great. Thank you, Steve. So just so people know we're, we have a battery of questions for each of our distinguished imaginators. My next question is for Spencer, and then we're going to go to Dave Troy, and then Pam, and then have and Nelson, kind of close this out. And then we're going to open up questions to our whole group. And after Alison, I asked Spencer some questions. We're gonna ask Dave, and Pam and in to maybe react to what Steven Spencer shared before we go into the questions to Dave. So we're starting with our two imaginators, who, who were in Colts. And, you know, at the end of day, we want to talk about the future of, of democracy. But I think having these people kind of give their life story helps give a little context. And next week, we're not talking about cults. We're talking about the ocean. The following week. We're looking to talk about China. In the following week. After that, we have Mark Bittman. We're talking about food. So, you know, we it's like a box of chocolates here. But it's always about imagination, action. So, Spencer Schneider, for 23 years, you were trapped in a cold headed by Sharon ganz that stole your identity, stole your dignity, your youth and your psychological freedom. Tell us a bit more about how as a successful corporate attorney, you were Lord in and recruited at the age of 29.

And Spencer, you're on mute. If you just tap the mic, you can take yourself off mute. Should we seem to have lost Spencer Alison Spencer is just in the area. Yeah. Oh, there he is. Hey, Spencer. You seem to be off mute. Did you hear my question? Maybe a Bluetooth thing that has nothing to do with the app.

JOHN if I may while we're waiting for Spencer I knew I worked with people in the group that Spencer was in actually it was a gurdjieff calls group a secret of called group and a lot of very very smart, talented, functional people with full time jobs like him in it just kind of filling space to Spencer live.

Yeah, Spencer any Any luck? You're adding drama. Also stay at Spence Spencer, the mute is in the lower right although he seems to be off mute. Sorry, john.

Maybe leaving the room and coming back in because there's a glitch in the system might help so just get out of the room and come back in.

Yeah, Spencer if you want to drop off and come back

is announced quietly button that you press and then we'll ping you back into the room. And that helps you reset. That's it.

Is that better? Spencer? Maybe say something?

Yeah, your mic could be off.

Alison to enlist? Okay, Spencer, why don't you try?

Okay, unmute yourself, Spencer. Let's hope it works. The unmute button is on your right bottom hand corner, just click it and unmute yourself. And then you can speak.

So, Allison, I'm thinking of going to Dave Troy, unless you have another suggestion.

No, that sounds good to me.

Yep. Hey, Dave, great to have you here. You've been studying disinformation manipulation. For quite some time. I feel like it's been dog years time seven. how vulnerable Do you believe our society is these days to be manipulated?

Yeah, I mean, I think we are extremely vulnerable. I got into, you know this by studying social media data, starting many years ago. So back in like the 2006 to 2007 timeframe, I started going into the API's of some of the social media platforms, I was the first developer on the Twitter API and started getting data out of there and looking at it. And what I was really curious about was sort of how do people naturally

figured out how to do it? Sorry, sorry. Do you want me to? Do you want me to wait, john? Or should I just wait for Dave to finish?

Yeah, so one thing I would say is no worries about this technological glitch. We're recording this, we'll edit it. And in perpetuity, you know what, this wouldn't have happened. But Spencer, we're glad you're with us. I was worried, maybe a cult had gotten you or something. So, Dave, why don't you finish this question? And then we're going to go to Spencer, because you're kind of building hearing from the two folks that were in the cult. But so yeah, so Dave, when you finish, and then we'll go to you, Spencer?

Sure. So yeah, as I was saying, I have been studying this, the data that was produced on social media for a long time, you know, since around 2007. And what I was really interested in understanding was how do people organize themselves into kind of cliques and clusters? And you know, what, how does that get reflected out in our real world experience. And so social media offers kind of an interesting lens into that it's not perfect by any means. It does not reflect accurately how we organize ourselves into social networks in the real world. Exactly. But it is a proxy, it is a kind of a lens into that, and it helps us understand it. So I've been, you know, doing visualizations of that kind of stuff for a long time. And I did a TED talk in 2014, that got a decent amount of traction, and spent a lot of time traveling around the world doing similar kinds of visualizations and talking about it, and really comparing different cities and whatnot to each other. And getting a feel for, you know, how how we can be sort of herded into groups and what those groups say about us. So for example, I would frequently find that there would be groups of like artists and people involved in you know, culinary arts and music, and those kinds of things would be all clustered together. And people that were really interested in sports would be clustered together and people that were really interested in, you know, like police and stuff like that would be clustered together. And what that kind of led to was an understanding of how disinformation campaigns operate online and sort of what clusters those campaigns are effective against. And what I began to realize over the course of the last five years or so was that a lot of these campaigns, you know, we're really working hard to divide us and to break people into ever increasingly smaller clusters that were more tightly wound. You know, we've all had the experience of getting into some kind of an argument online that ends in the use of the block button. And, you know, what that tends to do is it tends to break society down and to atomize us ever further, into smaller and smaller groups of interest. And what you'll, you'll notice over the course of the last, you know, four years or so in particular, is that there seems to be some new controversy or issue that pops up every day that we all have to react to. And sometimes it falls strictly upon party lines. Sometimes it divides people within the parties. But it always ends up creating these sort of smaller and smaller groups. And so what I started to realize was that that kind of activity where we're breaking people down into these smaller tighter groups is very similar to the kind of thing that happens with the formation of cult groups and you know, the at some point these small tightly one groups get to a point where they really don't care what the overall interests of society are, they're only interested in their own in groups, self interest. And so that actually, is the reason that I got in touch with both Steve and with an, we've been working together on this together for the last couple of years or so. And, you know, what we realized is that this all of these problems are kind of interconnected. And so as kind of a generalist, and you know, somebody that's interested in history and technology and politics, I've kind of been trying to create bridges between like Anne's work and Steve's work as well as some of my own original thinking on this. And, you know, really began to realize that the way the reason why disinformation is a problem isn't because people are trying to get people to take on specific false beliefs, although sometimes that is a goal. And sometimes that is a byproduct of disinformation disinformation, though, has an effect on how we socially organize ourselves. And it breaks us down into these smaller tighter groups, makes us more cultish. And so that's to me was kind of a key insight. And so what I've been working to do is to start to formulate that set of ideas more carefully. And I'm, I'm in the process of writing some things on that that'll be released pretty soon. I'm having scholars like Steve review it, but coming at it from a very multidisciplinary kind of background. So looking at it not only, you know, from the viewpoint of like, you know, called science, but also looking at it from a sociological and political science point of view, to see if these ideas really hold up, and I think they do. So. Yeah, you know, that's kind of my lens is bringing this kind of broad, you know, generalist view to the set of problems and trying to understand us in terms of how vulnerable we are, I mean, realistically, what's happening right now is that the people that are, you know, putting out this information and manipulating society, really, it's a kind of cultural engineering, they're getting us to a point where democracy just doesn't function, you know, we have a situation emerging, if it's not already here, where we have a society that is incompatible with democracy. And that's part of the reason that, you know, we can't seem to agree on anything or get anything done. I mean, you know, we saw yesterday there was, you know, big new reports about climate, you know, the idea that we're going to actually do something about that, that's meaningful in time, I think, is quite doubtful, in some ways, given the current situation. And so, I am a big believer that the first step to creating positive changes is giving people an accurate diagnosis. And it's very difficult, I think, for people to process the news and everything that's going on, because it doesn't seem to make any sense. So what I'm trying to do is to provide some frameworks that help people make sense of what they're seeing and experiencing in the world.

Dave, thank you for that. And he's foreshadowing a little bit what we're gonna get from Dave, and we asked him some questions. But back to you, Spencer,

do you want me to repeat the question?

I think your question. First of all, I'm sorry about that. I didn't know where the button was. But I think the question was, how did I get involved in this group? Right? Yeah, yeah.

Well, I was like, I like I like the introduction. Had I, you know, I was 29. I was working in Manhattan. Very long hours, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, which was to be a lawyer. But I was missing a lot of things in my life, which were, you know, having fun, and, you know, spending time with my friends. And you know, when you're working 1012 hours a day, you know, that's your life. And when you work for a law firm, it's almost like, you know, this, the separate world that you're in. And so when I got an invitation from an acquaintance who had shown great interest in me, meeting with me several times and, and whatnot, it was all very hush, hush. I really didn't know what was going on. And one day, he confided in me that he was involved in a esoteric group. And mind you let me back up about this person. He went to Stanford, undergrad, he was studying at Harvard architecture school. really bright guy. Really weird. I had the heebie jeebies about it when he started talking about going to an esoteric school with, you know, teachers and it was I had to keep it secret. It sounded totally nuts. And I told him, I thought it was crazy. And I walked out. And then he called or I called him because I felt bad. Because I was so abrupt with him. And I, I said, Look, I'm sorry. You know, I'd like to hear more about it. But it sounds like a call. He said, I promise you, it's not a call me somebody else. I said, Okay, fine. So this is a 1989, we met at this restaurant. And he said, a friend is coming Well, in walks. Absolute beautiful woman. And that was it. I mean, I thought, okay, I'll go to a meeting. You know, we sat we talked to very intelligent, also highly educated, worked on Wall Street. This couldn't be a cult, there's no way. And I have to tell you, it wasn't until I left 23 years later, the day after I left, that I said, this was a cult, the first year, it couldn't have been nicer to get the kind of attention I had, and the friendships and the support I had from 50 other people like me, was a remarkable thing that I couldn't have. And no one could have, unless you were in some kind of group setting, with very supportive people. You know, so that easily, you know, for the first year that easily could not have could have not been a cult, but it changed. And it changed in a way that was very destructive for me. And for the 1000s of people who've been in it over the years, it's, you know, very secret group. You know, I think I'm one of maybe two or three people who've spoken about it publicly, even now, people who do talk about it, or do so anonymously on the web. And that's why I wrote about it. And that's why I think it's important to reveal the truth, and to speak about it, because I think that's the first step in getting people to change their minds about it, and to look at things. That's what, you know, helped me get out. So that's a long answer to your question.

So, Spencer, first of all, thank you for speaking out, I think many of us really appreciate it. And you had such a powerful description of your experience in the New York Post, I wondered if you'd allow me to share a little bit of what you wrote. And then to offer some commentary, because I have to admit, when I read this article, it was just so powerful and really encapsulated. The richness of what I think a lot of books have. So you wrote at the peak, there were hundreds of us, we were invisible. We didn't even have an actual name. We met two nights a week for discussions and loft spaces and lower Manhattan. We were highly educated, skilled professionals living in the city and going about our lives. Many of us were spouses, some involve some not and children. We were successful business owners, money managers and investors, scientists, doctors, teachers, artists off offers savvy people, none of us would have been caught dead in a cold. Nor did any of us in a word in a cult. Exactly. Most of us were recruited when we were going through trying times, hitting roadblocks in our lives looking for community, a friend or acquaintance invited us to check out an exclusive group that they said was studying philosophical ideas. We told ourselves, we were just being open minded. We called what we did school, we were sworn to secrecy about the very existence of school, and that suited us just fine. So I just found that a resting, can you give a little bit more background on what your life was like in this group and the type of activities that took place in the school? I think your article goes on to mention that members were pressured to recruit many people a week to share their net worth to pay monthly dues to do physical work for the leader, and even taking marital and relationship advice from the school. But maybe you can give us a bit more sense once you were in it what it was like to be in it.

Yeah, sure. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that what you read was from the article that I wrote that was in East magazine in 2019. I think it was then so not the post. But yeah, I mean, that was that article was light, because I didn't really want and wasn't prepared to get into, you know, really the dark part of it, but it was very dark. I mean, my life was you know, this the you know, like the outer and the inner. So, let me talk to you about the outer. I went I was a lawyer. I went to, you know, work Every day it was a very successful had a great practice, I still do. I did work for some people who were in the cult. And, you know, that was a good and a bad thing, mostly bad, because, you know, everything was controlled by the leader who was sharing gains. But, you know, these were very smart people who made a lot of very bad choices. Because of the kind of thing that we were in.

There were people who gave their life savings, there were two people who were seen on two very well known families who gave millions to Sharon Ganz there were dozens of people who gave, you know, you know, their, their savings to create a, a compound upstate, for for the cult, where people would go on the weekends, then we're forced adoptions. People gave up their babies, because Sharon thought they weren't good parents and gave these babies to other people in the cult. They were arranged marriages, I was in an arranged marriage. Okay. There were, you know, there was money laundering. I found out about that afterwards. I mean, I knew they were taking in, you know, millions a year in cash, because, you know, a lot of us paid in cash. But there was, you know, there was a real estate empire that this owner, Mrs. leader had. So why did we look through past all this? Well, you know, that's a question for the experts. You know, I can tell you how, why it was for me, but maybe the experts in this could can answer it, I think it has a lot to do with, you know, the sort of dependency and there's love for community, and believing that you're doing something very important, which is what we felt. So I mean, you know, you know, evenings were spent, you know, at a loft, with, you know, 5060 other people where we would talk about the girl chip ideas and whatnot, but we'd also talk about our lives and get advice, but it was usually instructions, and some of them were, you know, you know, very harsh. And, you know, if you didn't follow the advice, you were not a good student, and you didn't want to be that. So I hope that answers your question.

Yep. Great. So Spencer, you know, this is a little bit like, People Magazine feature section little voyeuristic. Thanks for for sharing this. And I think people are getting a sense for what it was like, from the inside. So we understand you left in 2013, after 23 years in the school? What were the circumstances that got you to leave? And how many other members do you think left? You said that, you know, no one has spoken publicly about it or one other person. But just curious from from where you said, you know, how did you leave and who else is left?

Okay, so, died this year of COVID, there are probably 100 people still left in the cult, but through the 23 years that I was there, people came and went all the time, the recruiting, you know, was very, really a big part of this. So let me just tell you that and they'll tell you why I left the recruit. And there have been, you know, 1000s of people in and out and through the years, but the recruiting was very unique. We were, you know, it was a secret group. People were sworn to secrecy, we were not to tell anyone about the existence of this group. And that was something that we liked, okay.

And it was something that the leaders like because let them live undercover, okay. They had previously had bad publicity, and they didn't want any more bad publicity. So the way we recruited was extremely surreptitious. We would meet friends, we meet people on the street, befriend them, meet, you know, vet them, and then also more than at the same time by sprinkling conversations about esoteric ideas related to the cult, okay. And then when we felt we had their trust, and we saw that they were making over $100,000 a year, they didn't have any family in law enforcement or authors or, you know, weren't others. qualifications. Sharon didn't like to bring gay people or of African Americans because she was a homophobe. And, and racist, though, and and once we, we felt that they were vetted, we would invite them, and very few people would come. So we had to recruit around the clock for months and months and months. And it was a condition of, of membership to recruit. But the reason I got out was because, you know, there was a crisis in my life. And, you know, it's, I describe it more in the book, I can't get into the whole thing about it, but there was a crisis in my life. And the cult was not there for me as I had hoped they would be, you know, I got divorced. And in my job, the, the my partner was being investigated by the government, and they were looking into the cult, and I didn't want to end up like my, and I got out. And it was not easy. And I was suicidal. I was deeply depressed. I was, you know, you know, losing four pounds a week. And, you know, I survived. That's a whole nother story. But I was very lucky, you know, very, very lucky.

Spencer, what would be your answer to John's question of how many other members managed to leave? You said, there are hundreds now in and maybe several 100 that have been in but how many like you have left?

Oh, well, people who've been there over? You know, I, you know, if you've been there over like 15 years, not that many people leave? Like a handful. I mean, not that many people who've been in as long as I have been in leave. So I, you know, I couldn't tell you exactly how many. But you know, if you've been there for less than 10 years or five years, you're, you know, people come and go. And there were hundreds, you know, many hundreds.

One, one of the elements you alluded to that I think would be really interesting for our listeners, is just what are the top signs that you think we and and listeners on this call, need to be alert to to know if a cult is operating around us? I mean, your experience, as you said, suggests that cult start out with kind of a honeymoon period where you feel you have lots of good friends and deep connection and get lured in. But what what are some tips that listeners can take away to know who our friends and when we're being recruited?

Yeah, that's, you know, I mean, that is the, like Steve said, that's a million dollar question. It's very tough to figure to figure these things out. I think I you know, I think it depends on what the ask is, you know, I think if, if, you know, you have a good relationship with someone, great. But once the Ask comes because an ask came, and the Ask was big. And the Ask was start recruiting. And that's was the big first ask. And when they did that, I knew that, you know, this wasn't so good. But I had been so, you know, like, sucked into it already. That it was hard to say no. And I figured, okay, why not? But if I could go back, it's that asking, you know, and that's how I am now, if I hear an ask like, okay, it doesn't mean I'm going to shut off from every relationship, or asking me something. But, you know, I may sit back and think about it. So I don't think this this is a cause for you know, shutting yourself down or changing your life, but it does it like Steve says about being you know, certain mindful about what's being asked of you. And I also don't think I just wanted to say one thing. I am not I, you know, politically and all that stuff. What's going on is crazy. It's nuts. It sucks. I am not. I am not pessimistic about it at all. I think that, you know, the more good information that is out there, the better it is. And that's what the cult tried to keep us from doing which was from reading the internet and looking at things and they said, Oh, don't look at that. You know, I did. I disobeyed that. And it helped me.

The cult had a run in with Rosie O'Donnell actually the very it's a long story which I get into my book and she's actually doing the introduction for my book. Because and when she she sort of outed the cult back in 2001 on her show for like, 15 minutes of fame.

And she planted a seed and people were able, you know, some people in the cult left because of that it didn't work for me then but it planted the seed. So I think I'm getting off topic, but I think, you know, you just have to, in terms of identifying people who are in cults, you know, depends what the ask is.

Wow, it is such a rich story. And I sense we could spend the full time on either you you know, any of our any of our amazing speakers today, I just wanted to wrap up this part with one of the totes you had in the same article, which, again, I just found so powerful and would love your commentary on it. You said, Today, looking back, it's hard to believe that I didn't see it for what it was. But what I have come to understand is that these kinds of groups don't function under the same sober logic of the rest of the world. They are ruled by the irrational, Mercurial dynamics of abusive relationships, like junkies, we were powerless to the drug, which we needed just to feel normal. We were so thoroughly gaslighted by Sharon, that we believe leaving would be worse than staying. It has taken me many years to recover from this 23 year trauma and attack on my dignity. I didn't just drink the Kool Aid, I mainlined it. So I mean, for me, Spencer, this was just incredible to really get a sense of, you know, how the desire for community which we all have, and as you pointed out, in the beginning of your, your comments, were in an epic of loneliness. So you know, how the desire for affection and friends and attention, you know, ends up getting you in these abusive relationships. And I would just love to hear what you have learned about sort of what each of us has that makes us so vulnerable to the powerful learners of community, even when it comes with these abuses? Right.

Yeah, I mean, I wish I could say more about it. Like, and, you know, I mean, it's so complex, you know, abusive relationships. I, you know, I'm only learning about it from my own, you know, got being in therapy and hearing about it, and, you know, just really armchair stuff, so I can't really speak to, you know, the mechanics of it, and what really happens, I just know, that, you know, look, I, you know, it wasn't like I was, you know, like, you know, like, when I, when they found me, you know, I had did have friends, you know, I wasn't like a virgin, I, you know, I wasn't, you know, I was like, you know, any normal person, but 29 years old and working really hard. And, you know, they gave me something more than this made my life better. You know, it made things so much more interesting. You know, and I think, you know, I don't, you know, like that, you know, it, you know, there's something about feeling really good about yourself, you know, if they make you you know, if you feel good, you feel meaning, you know, the intellectual stimulation was incredible. It wasn't just like, you know, and I didn't really date anybody there for 10 years. So that didn't happen. It was more of like, a social thing. And the intellectual challenge that I enjoyed I, you know, and it just gave me something some meaning. So Spencer, let me just jump in here. In a moment, we're going to go to Dave and hear from and him through our interviews of them. But Dave, and in Pam just editorialize, what you've heard from Steven Spencer, you know, does this ring true? Do you? Is there anything you would add from where you sit? And then we're going to hear from Corey to musical interlude, as we get ready to interview more of Dave, but and, Pam, Dave, anything you want to weigh in here?

You know, is sort of transgressive compared to their original social network. So I think you know, all that's, that's where you kind of see that there's a continuum here and that all of these things are directly related to each other and why it's important for people to understand cults in order to understand our current political environment.

Thanks, Dave. Pam, in anything you would add?

Yeah, I can add something here. And, you know, when we get into it later, I can tell you my own little mini story about the same cult that Spencer was in. But you know, what, two of the things that I think I really want to underscore in terms of Spencer's story, knowing this cult, but also just the dynamics that you brought up, in the first is just kind of the profound power of what happens when you when you enter a group where there are what I call overlapping identities. You know, this cult was kind of Ivy League kind of Jewish kind of urban, slightly New Age, highly professional, lots of grad degrees. And what happens is, we tend to merge our sense of self with groups where we really recognize not just one identity, but these overlapping identities. And Spencer, you may disagree, but I feel like that's part of why oftentimes, we get very, very drawn in. And, you know, the only other point I would say is that we oftentimes really underestimate the power of arguing for something, you know, the more you argue for something, the more you believe it. So what happens is that recruiters and cults are essentially being programmed and recruited by the recruitment process. And so it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily matter. For example, if you go out and recruit 10 people during the day, if you only come back with one, you've had 10 arguments, so you're going to be in for 10 days longer. And I think we oftentimes underestimate that when we look at the, the process of proselytizing.

Great, and anything you want to add from where you sit.

So Dave Troy, you know, thanks for your that first question you pose that you answered. Second question to you is, can you explain a bit more how social media, how the has the potential terrorists apart? You know, a lot of the work you've done is very current. on this on this topic, you have a powerful talk that explains how combining Advanced Micro targeting with artificial intelligence poses particular risks to the future of our fragile democracies. You know, here, we've gone from two people who are in cults to now let's, let's talk a little bit more about the power of social media with the masses, can you kind of share some of the things that keep you up at night that you're working on? Yeah, sure. So, you know, again, having studied a lot of this social media data, you get a sense of kind of how the landscape works, what kind of messaging is being targeted at whom and why. And when you you know, really start to understand that what you see is that there is just this incredible desire to get people to react to stuff. And one of the things that studying political science will teach you about this is that groups of people that have become sort of separated and more tightly wound from, you know, their out group. So if you've got an in group and an out group, those groups that have become more tightly interconnected, and losing connections to other groups, they become much more reactive, and they become much more willing to condone political violence and that kind of thing. So you can also then control their behavior by directing specific kinds of messaging to them. So we've all experienced, you know, kind of the visceral experience of being online and seeing that there's some new piece of hot messaging that's come out, let's pick critical race theory just to pick one out of the hat that has everybody all wound up. Well, that didn't necessarily happen just by accident. It's not necessarily organic. You know, there are people that have been looking at what kind of issues create reactions in these specific networks, they kind of go harvest them or maybe even they throw a lot of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks and then whatever is the most reactive tends to get the most amplification, which in turn creates all of this noise in the echo chamber. And the end result of that is that it ends up dividing people further and further apart. And you know, creating a

You know, a lot of a lot of heat and noise around all this. So, you know, the kind of end result of that is that people behave more culturally. And the further that that process is driven, you know, we get to the point where we have these small, you know, subgroups of people that believe beyond anything else that, you know, their views are right, and that they're not going to listen to anybody else, whether it's, you know, about masks, or about critical race theory, or whatever else everybody has to be right. And, you know, we've also done a really great job of sorting ourselves geographically, so that, it's increasingly unlikely that you even will live around people that are different from you to the point where you can actually predict voting behavior by zip code pretty effectively. And that's pretty much directly tied to population density, there are some outliers to that. But the point being that we've become very brittle, we're very unresisted. country at this point. And the same applies to, you know, various European countries and the like.

So it just makes us, you know, very, very vulnerable to this kind of targeting and this kind of manipulation. And as Ann's work has shown, you know, there's stuff that goes even really much deeper than this, you know, there are people who are using psychological, you know, behavioral information, so like, you know, information about your visits to psychologists, and you know, people's mental health status, their use of alcohol, their use of drugs to target vulnerable people, and suck them into these social networks that will make them behave in more predictable ways, usually, to get them to vote, you know, more consistently on the right, and what have you. But, you know, this problem is wide spectrum, it's happening in all kinds of different ways. And they're all these things interacting at the same time. And, you know, we're very, really very vulnerable to it. And we have very little understanding of what actually is going on.

Dave, thanks. So this is imagination and action. This is long form journalism, is where people share their imagination and action. And we're really proud of this distinguished group of five, Alison and I are moderating. We have three more questions for Dave. But before we hear from Dave, I'd like to have an just chime in. After Dave, we're gonna interview Pam, and then and sort of our closer. And then after Anne says a few things. Before we get back to Dave, I'd love for Cory to do a musical interlude. You know, there's a long, long show and play saying, you know, that you think is appropriate. So Anne, do you want to comment on what you heard from Yeah, even Spencer, or what Dave just said, You're such a thoughtful person on a lot of these related topics.

Well, I should, I should say that I've been a lifelong student of media systems and religion, starting with American Protestantism. And I hear a lot of echoes of religious history, where some religions make a point of closing people off from the rest of society and encasing them in an enclosed media system. And so that's been going on for hundreds of years, 1000s of years. It's not every religion is not every sect within any religion. But it is common to many. And this kind of came crashing in on me when I visited a mega church in Florida some years ago. And they had this bookstore, and one of the members of the church said, Oh, I said, What do you read for news and she said, we don't we get everything from the church, we get the books, we get our kids videos, we get, you know, we're told how to vote. And that was kind of an early warning moment. Because what has happened in the 20 years since I had that conversation, is that digital media has really expanded the potential to close people off in these media systems. And they've needed to work with real person to person relationships. So as was noted earlier, you know, there's a famous book of sociology called Bowling Alone, Americans move every four years so they break up their family and their friends and their classmates relationships. And these religions and and not exactly religions and cults become a social organizing force where people have everything from dating services to babysitting.

And so then they become vulnerable to political manipulation, which often has an economic end. And where it becomes truly tragic is when you have people who are in communities like my home state of Oklahoma, Arkansas, who are convinced through these religious and media systems, to vote against clean water in their communities to vote against education for their children, because As they're manipulated by very carefully crafted messages that go out simultaneously through the social organizations, and the media systems.

Great, thank you. And and you may not know this, but Allison's brother was very involved with the Bowling Alone. Research with Professor Putnam. Corey, can you play something at this moment? And then we're going to continue. Dave, we have three great questions for you. We'll do something completely different first time. Great. Thank you, Cory, for that world class, accordion live, imagination, action. And we have five really thoughtful imaginators. Allison, back to you.

So Dave, this is so powerful to even begin to understand how you map out some of these dynamics and networks. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions, following up on your earlier answers to john. So first of all, how do you see these dynamics of manipulation and charismatic leaders playing out on the US national stage today? Do you think that these are driven by our own internal breakups sort of augmented by technology? Or do you think external forces out of the country are at play, and then I would love to hear a little bit more of what you share in terms of Steve's book on the cult of Trump and ways that you see some of these networks and behaviors in the the Trump following?

Sure. So my primary lens of understanding all of this stuff really comes from the mathematics of networks. And in terms of like, the imagination and action kind of theme, that's really, I think, kind of the piece that that I'm able to bring to this that, you know, ties a lot of different things together and helps us maybe understand it in a different way, which I just think is a useful tool for, you know, looking at this a little bit differently, and maybe not feeling so much despair about, you know, that nothing can be done that we actually can't understand this. And I've heard a lot of people say that using this lens, has really given them a lot of hope in terms of, you know, actually understanding what's happening. So the first thing I think, you know, we need to understand with regards to your question about is this sort of an American problem or something that's happening externally, is that it's actually a network global problem. Basically, there's a network of factions that has aligned interest globally. And the Russian interference tagline that we kept hearing and the meddling and all of that over the last several years, was unhelpful because it was incomplete. And it wasn't because it was inaccurate. There was definitely Russian interference, and definitely Russia with meddling. There's no question about that. But it also failed to take into account this very global interaction between networks of people in Europe, in the US and Australia, in China, and you know, other parts of the world. And basically, when you start to really actually map out those networks and understand what these factions are, you start to see that they have history and that they've been around A long time. So I did an article series called The Big History behind January 6, which for reasons of just keeping it somewhat compact, I went back to about 1933. And discovered that the same networks of people that brought us January six, also brought us an attempted coup in 1934. They did not actually go through with it, because the guy that they recruited to pursue it and a general named Smedley Butler, blew the whistle on them and reported them to Congress. But it turns out, it's basically the same network of people that went on to form the john birch society, which later went on to form the council for national policy, which is what Anne's work has been focused on primarily. And that same network of people is the people primarily responsible for January six. So when you actually figure out what that network's primary gripe is, and there are several, but one of the main ones is the repeal of the gold standard by Roosevelt in 1933, to fund the New Deal, and what you find is that that network of people was connected with, you know, historically that the networks in Europe that were connected with the Nazi Party, so this the anti Bolshevik networks, they were also connected with anti communist networks in Asia and in Central America. And if you think about 20th century history as this kind of competition between networks, where, you know, you've got different players, maybe at different times, but the same fundamental set of interests persists over the course of decades. That's what we actually have playing out here. But Has anybody heard that narrative in news reporting? Not really. And the reason for that, I think, is many fold. But one reason is that, you know, the media is pretty underfunded overall, it also doesn't tend to have a lot of appetite for presenting history, in any kind of, you know, coherent way. Most of the time, you know, you might get a history article on the weekend magazine or whatever. But you know, you're generally not going to read about that in today's, you know, front page headlines, and certainly not as part of the coverage of something like January 6, so you're going to get commentary about the New Deal. So

what I've been looking at in terms of, you know, really understanding this, you know, as you say, like, Is this an internal American problem or a foreign problem, it's all of the above, and it's been going on for decades, and we have a pretty poor understanding of it. And by looking at it from a slightly different way we can actually understand not only you know what, what has happened, but we might actually be able to predict what's gonna happen next. So this obsession with the gold standard has to do with some very particular ideas about how money should work that we can get into if there's time. But that has now mapped into the world of cryptocurrencies. And a lot of the same people that have been pursuing the gold standard instead of fiat currency are now very interested in cryptocurrency and it has become part of this long standing conflict between networks. So you gave you know, Alice, the Wizard of Oz is a political allegory, the yellow brick road was gold. The slippers were silver, they were changed to ruby red because of Technicolor. William Jennings Bryan, the guy ran for president multiple times is the is the Cowardly Lion. Industrial worker is the tin man. The there's a former, the good, which is the wind that helps the farmer and that movie was all about the silver versus gold. So you can go back even further than the 30s to see, see, yeah, that all goes back to L Frank bombs experienced in the 1890s in the Midwest, trying to navigate, you know, that election, which was all about the gold standard. So yeah, I mean, this these themes go way, way, way back, probably Emerald City is gold is the greenback and McKinley is ours. Yeah. Now bear in mind, that's an interpretation that was put out in 1964 by a history professor who thought that that was an interesting lens, but there's a decent amount of, you know, other material that suggests that bomb was very aware of all of that, and would have been very likely to incorporate some of that symbology into into that story. So that's another fascinating angle on less. Yeah. So my next question is, how do you map the complex web of influence that led to the ascendancy of Trump and and still supports his presidency even after the January six attempted coup? You know, I know Biden's our president, but you know, I think some portion assembly million plus people that voted for Trump think you know, have other thoughts. What role does the christian right the alt right, the right wing media and the Q anon play in this network Now, for those listening? This is a very dense show. We have five leading experts, we are recording this, you can play this over, and we will be transcribing it. So you can read the transcription if you don't get it all. But, Dave, that's a loaded question. What do you got? Yeah. So, you know, when this all started sort of going down, where we realized that, you know, there was a big problem with disinformation, and, you know, even organized crime getting more into the mix in terms of influencing politics and whatnot, I

started to map out kind of like, what is the network of influence that we're talking about here. So, in 2016, I basically put together a list of all of the key players kind of in Trump world and a couple of degrees out, and started mapping the connections between them based on news articles, and, you know, other kinds of connections that I could document clearly. And this was really just an exercise for myself, to understand what the hell was happening here, because it wasn't clear to me that Trump was the source of the power, it seemed to me that he wasn't. And so the question then was, well, what is the source of the power? And exactly how are these networks connected? And if they are connected to Russia, how are they connected? So what I found from that analysis was that it was really the cokes and the Mercer's and Putin's network that were much more influential in terms of actually being kind of in charge and running things and being central to that network. And it became very clear from visualizing that network that Trump's network was really independent. Because if you remember, you know, in 2016, when Trump was having his kind of ascendancy, you know, that network was more interested in Ted Cruz and other folks that, you know, we're presenting some signs of promise, and they that was kind of where they were putting their efforts behind. And they were, you know, Cambridge Analytica was behind Ted Cruz, before it switched over to Trump. And then Trump just kind of became the this juggernaut that was linked enough to those networks, already, that they could felt like that they could kind of run him, and he would be a suitable avatar, to make this work. And he had enough popular appeal and good understanding of media and things like that. So he kind of just plowed through and made this happen. So it's kind of this unholy alliance between the cokes and the Mercer's in the Trump, you know, network, and one of the things that I think is important to realize is that if Trump, when Trump dies, Lord, you know, willing, he will be replaced by somebody else, you know, it's going to be Tucker Carlson, or, you know, whoever. So I think it's just really important to understand that this is a network thing. And it is it's, it's not a temporary Blip. It is a network that is trying to gain ascendancy over the long term. And it is connected with organized crime and a variety of other interests. And, you know, it may render our situation such that the country is not really compatible with a democracy. So, you know, that's kind of what's at stake here. And I think it's important to understand that from a network point of view,

can you say a little bit more, Dave, because that last sentence is so provocative? Like, how would you describe the techniques and approaches that the far right is using these days to build a political agenda? And when you say, this is not compatible with democracy? Can you say a little bit more about that?

Yeah. So, you know, it's, you know, really, really good. We have, you know, cold conversations going on, you know, with like, Steve here, because this is exactly what is being deployed. So if you look at something like human on, it is basically using the tools of disinformation and the tools of covert manipulation to create this network of people who are willing to kind of accept all sorts of absurdities. And, you know, really do the bidding politically of, you know, this, this broader network. And, you know, one of the key characteristics about colds and you know, I think Steven Spencer could certainly attest to this is that a lot of times, the people that are sort of at the edge of the pyramid, don't really understand the true nature of the cult, the reason why this thing exists or what its motivations are. So this sort of stuff happening in the, you know, Sanctum Sanctorum, at the top level doesn't really make its way out to the folks at the edge. So, as much as Q anon seems like a ridiculous phenomenon, espousing all sorts of strange beliefs about lizard people and Satanism and pedophilia and whatever, it it doesn't matter. The beliefs themselves could be anything, as we've seen, they shift all the time and they don't make any sense. The key is, is that you've created this manipulable network of social capital that can be deployed for political means, mostly in service of opposing the out group. So it's most important to figure out who the alum group is. And the key defining characteristic of Q anon is that it knows who the out group is. And it's, you know, the democrats and the globalists and whoever, the bankers, the central bankers, you know, they're all on board with ripple and various crypto things now, so it's very clear what kind of the the overall goal here is. So, you know, as we get to a point, where these cokes are more and more tightly wound and interconnected, inter connected on the inside, to each other and less connected to other networks, the more controllable they are, and the more reactive they are, and it makes it so that, you know, this idea of like reaching across the aisle and partisan bipartisanship, and all of that is just not functional. And, unfortunately, our democracy, as it was designed by the framers depends on a certain amount of that. And so, you know, we may occasionally manage to get something done, but it's becoming rare and, you know, few and far between. and, you know, the idea that we can confront our biggest challenges such as climate, you know, such as health disparities, and you know, all these kinds of things that we probably should do, because they're just the right thing to do, are not really going to get done because of this technology, this political technology that's being used to manipulate people to make the country more and more unruly. Wow, big words.

Before I asked a question to Pam, and we have three great questions for you, Pam, do any of this imaginators want to just comment on I'll take one comment on what Dave just said, anyone want to just react to it either, say something counterintuitive, or, or add to what he just said?

Oh, I'd like to chime in and say that the dominionists and the Christian nationalists want to undo the separation of church and state. And in the cult of Trump, I talk about Opus Dei, the family. I did not know about shadow network and brilliant book on the Council of national policy, but the same people are involved in the neo nazis and and the other right wing cult group. So my thesis in the book is that the cult of Trump is comprised of many authoritarian cults. And it's the leadership of each of these cults that broke comprised Trump's base. So that's what I wanted to do quick comment. Yeah, no, thanks. Yes. Anyone else want to make a comment? I said, one, but, and or, Pam, we're about to ask you some questions.

Anyone want to respond?

Well, I'll just respond by saying that, although the followers tend to believe that they're making statements of faith, and often with the best of intentions, if you if you dig down very deeply, you will see very large economic interests, many of them rooted in the fossil fuels industry and adamantly opposed to any kind of progressive climate policy, and what I would call greed and lust for power. So that is one of the difficult things about about contesting what they're doing it because the messaging and the intent are so disconnected.

Great, thank you. And and we're excited to have you be our kind of closer before we open up a conversation amongst the five of you. So Pam, you are a noted expert on disinformation, an advisor to many in the field, help us understand what is happening in the current world that is new. We have always had some elements of manipulation. But how did they get so supercharged? Is there some trifecta of loneliness? Social media and manipulation is creating new forms of cults and supercharging some extreme aspects of society from your vantage point, you know, share, you know what you're thinking what, you know, what, what is your imagination taking you? Where's the action in all this?

Oh, well, thank you. that's a that's a big and really important and interesting question. I'll try to tackle it. I mean, I think that there are probably several factors at play and the subordination of, of truth and the emergence of these kind of supercharged cults and extreme organizations. You know, there's, it's really a layering of different factors, really, that has created this too. I mean, we start with this giant class divide that we're all aware of. I mean, we know in like 2008, 13 million people lost their homes while hedge funds were thriving. And many of those people became Trump supporters not because they necessarily joined a cult, but because they really felt profoundly wronged. And they were really attracted to the anger that was expressed. Same thing with Bernie Sanders, he expressed a lot of anger as well. And he brought a lot of people to his side, too, because anger really blunts our view of policy oftentimes. So we saw this kind of anti elite dynamic also at that time with Brexit with the election of McCrone and others. So we have that going on. And then as we know, the line between opinion and fact has been obscured now for a long time. There's enormous confusion over who a real expert is. And a lot of people become cult leaders. And, you know, they're not necessarily experts, or a lot of people go on television, say they're experts with a white coat when they don't really shouldn't have a white coat on giving medical advice. So there's a declining reliance on really respected sources of information. We've all retreated to our partisan media and information silos. And you know, I think the other thing that's been like a really embedded part of our culture now, you know, for a long time, you don't remember alex jones telling us Sandy Hook didn't happen is just the the weaponization of the notion that there there's no such thing as objective truth. You know, and this idea has been used very conveniently to counter factual arguments on climate change on vaccine efficacy and others. And I think it's really important to keep that in mind. And you know, and then finally, I mean, that the the other piece that we oftentimes disregard in this stew that has led us to this, and I won't say deception epidemic anymore, I now think we're close to a gaslighting epidemic, is just the human journey. You know, I mean, mental health issues are on the rise. Our notions about identity are changing, we're on the very early part of the curve, on these dramatic changes in identity as we kind of grapple with new forms of gender fluidity and others. And that causes a lot of disruption in terms of who we think we are. And the thing that we always forget, is that it is just cognitively far more demanding to be a critical thinker, than to enjoy stories that are optimized for outrage or to get loved, bombed by attractive people and then have drinks with them as, as Spencer was doing, you know, and so feelings and identity and belonging always tend to carry more weight than evidence and facts. And it's very, very hard to encourage people to take on that cognitive load. And I think COVID is finally just kind of unmasked, how frail and lonely and on the edge, we all have the capability of being. So it's this big stew that's brought us here, I don't think there's one particular factor.

Oh, my gosh, Pam, what a powerful like we're all cooking in it. So what role do you think that internet and technology play? I mean, could you imagine that we'd have our current political state and the state we're in, and such powerful cults in a pre internet era, you described it as a sociological and economic phenomena. But what what role does technology play here?

Well, you know, when you think about it, Jim Jones got hundreds of people to kill themselves before the internet, the the own cult, and Tokyo got people who want a gas attack on the subway, long before the internet, Heaven's Gate got 35 people to kill themselves that they could get on a UFO and go live in space. All that happened before the internet. And so, you know, I think that what's happened the internet supercharges supercharges. The process certainly, and it makes both isolation of occult more difficult and at the same time, transparency is there instead also allows allows, you know, fakers to be revealed more easily. It certainly has supercharged recruiting. But this that it's really a supercharging you know, greasing of the gears more than it is a profound change, I think. I mean, there are small cults all over the country and you know, we've barely near they're just about to have their me to moment. I think we've barely gotten there. And the internet will certainly facilitate that. But I think the the, the need for belonging, and the wit and the dynamics of cult recruitment, have been around for a long time, the tactics have just changed and become easier with the internet in many, many ways. Pam, how vulnerable Do you think our society is to manipulation? You have shared that you were solicited by the disuse group that Spencer described, but didn't bite.

How? What I mean by didn't bite you didn't. You didn't join, how did that experience get you interested in media manipulation and disinformation? What were the signs that attracted you, and the warning signs that turned you off?

So, you know, I have not been, you know, I have a newfound interest in cults really in the last eight, nine months. And since I was reminded of my one experience many, many years ago with the same cult that Spencer was involved in, and actually it connected me and Spencer, and we're involved in some media projects now on his story. But the and I'll tell you this story, but basically, the same cult that Spencer was in, tried that I was approached at a time when I was young, single, searching, living in New York, I was at East West books, a spiritual bookstore hanging around and a guy who was educated Harvard, attractive, came and kind of picked me up and took me out for coffee, and then another coffee, and then another coffee, and then another coffee. And he was like, Hey, you want to come to my school? You know, I think it's your I was a target. You know, I was professional and single, making money. And I didn't recognize it as a cult. And I went one night to school because I was interested in the sky. And what I witnessed was, and this is another conversation altogether, but what I witnessed was some of the most incredible verbal manipulation and abuse that I'd ever, ever witnessed. There was someone who stood up and was talking about getting an abortion. And she was lambasted for it lambasted for being upset lambasted for doing it. And I got up in the middle of the evening, and I walked out. And so I'd always thought about this cold, I never went back. I never talked to anybody there again, I thought the whole thing was just absurd. I happen to have landed on a very extreme evening, I might have been pulled in had they been loved bombing me instead that evening. But I just walked away. And it was kind of like unfinished business, I always want to know what happened with them. And so when Spencer story came out, I recognized the cult. So that's kind of my personal, my personal story with it.

The question about how, how vulnerable we are to manipulation, I have to say, one of the things I'm most concerned about, I mean, I think we are very, very vulnerable to manipulation for exactly the reasons Dave brought up in terms of the sophistication of the structures, we don't really recognize how sophisticated how much money is running for the structures that can manipulate us as well as how extensive they are. But with the internet, in particular, I'm very interested right now, in deep fakes, I think that, you know, we are kind of landing soon into sort of a gas lighting culture, meaning that, you know, the act of undermining another person's reality by simply denying facts or the environment around them or their feelings.

That is, that is something that I think can be

exponentially advanced with the advent of deep fakes and fake video. And so I think that, you know, we do have lots of work in front of us to keep that at bay. So, Nikki, we're about to ask. Thank you, Pam.

We're about to ask some questions to end. But before we do, Nikki, in your description, says coach, survivor and overcomer of narc abuse, and mind control certified life coach. Expert. Yes. So on. Nikki, would you like to pose a question two or five? imaginator?

Well, I just want to just First of all, thank you so much, john, and the moderators for holding this space. I think this is such such an important topic. And, Steven, thank you so much for the work you've been doing. It has been beneficial in my life. As my bio says, I hail from a narcissistic family. And then I was involved in excuse me, five Colts, and my life and a lot of them came out of what Stephen was just speaking about as far as the Gnar, or new episodic reformation and dominionist Arena. And so I'm sorry, I've been listening to everything that's been said. And it's just been so fascinating and Dave, just giving all of the the political history as far as where we are right now, you know, globally and even in this country and things of that nature. But I think that the spiritual component is definitely something that should be talked about should be studied interview people who've been in spaces like this, because the spiritual component is really was taking over, in my opinion, I guess because of what I've actually experienced. And what I mean by that is the I'm actually teaching excuse me on the one side So I'm normally not nervous, but I'm using I'm actually talking about on clubhouse I have a group called spiritual abuse and cults and I'm speaking about new episodic reformation and spiritual abuse, because I believe a lot of what's going on politically with Trump. And January six has a lot to do with that convergence of that particular quote. And the reason why I say that is because how that cult was formed, or really, the governance of it is apostles and prophets are the ones who lead it out. And so they believe that this is the third wave, the third awakening that God has ordained in these cults in these arenas, excuse me, that God has ordained the apostles and prophets to have the authority to not only within a church structure, but globally, and I'm pretty sure Dr. Hassan can speak to this as well. But being in those five colds, it was very damaging, very traumatic, I went through a lot of spiritual abuse, because people believe that these apostles and prophets are God's spokeman. And so, if an apostle or Prophet says, Yes, God has ordained Trump to be the next president, or God has ordained this senator to be in office, a lot of times that people connect their relationship with God, to what the prophets and the apostles say, not necessarily having critical thinking skills, not necessarily, you know, having their own ability to reason, and to have their own relationship with God, they put it on the prophets and the apostles. And so these ones actually say what they feel God has ordained them to say, but it's really to take over. And these are the ones these apostles and prophets are the ones that's been prophesied over Trump. They're the ones that's been telling Trump that God has anointed him to do all that he's doing. And then they go back into the churches, and they feed this stuff to the people, the people believe it. And then when truth comes, and reality comes and facts are right in front of their face, they don't really take it in. They just believe the man and woman of God. And I believe that a lot of that is what's helping to people to be have people under a spell, so to speak, a lot of memorization, a lot of groupthink, and people's inability to think and reason for themselves. So I just wanted to add to what Dave said, and what Steven said about the spiritual components that will go into all Nike, thank

you for sharing and complementing what's been said. And in appreciating what what's been discussed. Alice and I are a little out of our depth here on this topic. We did some research, but we have five really thoughtful people who have a lot to say. And thank you for your comments. Daniel, before we ask, and our kind of closing speaker before we open up to discussion, I see that you're the founder of deep fakes, stop. Anything you want to ask our group or make a comment, like Nikki just did?

Sure. There are, I guess, several comments I wanted to throw out there. Because I am very interested in fighting deep fake media, which is, you know, falsely generated pewter media, from AI. There are so many points that have already been touched on in this room already on this topic, right. So like, the cult of Trump, in fact, was one of the first ones to really vastly employ the use of deep fake media to make it for instance, look like Hillary Clinton was drunk at times, or Nancy Pelosi was drunk and things like that, just by slowing down their audio and making it look bad. But like, that's just the tip of the iceberg. And I guess I want to throw out there a couple of things. So related to the undermining of democracy I want to throw out there that local politicians right now, basically, anyone at the state level in the US or lower, generally, is not worried about deep fakes as much as they ought to be. And they don't understand that a single deep fake media video produced by a soccer mom posted to a Facebook group could severely damage their campaign and make it very hard to recover. And that's something that's not really on their radar right now.

And conversely, there's the I think there's pretty good evidence that a lot of cults for instance, use things like video recordings of interviews they do with you, you know, if they capture that they can then deep fake it for you after they've, you know, brainwashed you walk in a room for three months and make it look to you on video like you said, and did something that you Can't remember saying or doing. But now at that point, you can't remember saying or doing a lot of things that you might have done. It's It's really scary how easy it is for that technology to be employed right now. And how many malicious uses there are versus the potential good uses for that same technology. Great. Thank you, Allison. Let's,

let's bring our series of questions to end. Why don't you go first?

Okay, wow, what this discussion? Um, all right. And you have this book that's been referenced several times called the shadow network. And I've spent years tracking political and influence networks. What is it that you learned in writing your book and speaking on this topic?

Well, first of all, you know, as one of the earlier speakers said, it's, it's not which group is, is operating here. It's a convergence of groups that use similar strategies. And the big idea here is that they're closely coordinated. So the subtitle of my book is media money and the secret hub of the radical right. And as earlier speakers have said, there is Russian influence that you can trace back for decades, connected to the shot the council for national policy, as the caller said, the the new apostolic reformation has been a major component of this organization and their strategy recently, these are churches that don't really belong to a traditional denomination. And they have very clearly targeted minority populations and tried to bring them into the heavily conservative Republican fold, even though it's often against their self interest as as citizens but but to use the persuasion of the group, think of the church and their their media systems and rhetoric to pressure them to vote in certain ways. You've got organizations like the Campus Crusade for Christ, or now known as crew, which Dave Tory referenced, which is mining health information and trying to find vulnerable individuals to bring into the political fold. And so what is so powerful about this is that it's got different gears to their machine, they've got a Leadership Institute, which has trained some 200,000 candidates and campaign managers, to get them to speak the same language to use the same canvassing approaches in their political campaigns. The other factor is, as Dave mentioned, we've had over the last century Americans who have signed on to a kind of fact based evidence, information culture, that is universities in science, it is journalism. And there's a kind of, you know, marketplace of ideas, where people try to find the truth through this interrogation. And in other parts of the country, including the south, on the southwest and the Midwest. There are people in rural communities who have been cut off from the information culture, and they're more accustomed through their family and their cultural relationships to an authority relationship. So when this organization and these political strategists go to them, they say, we'll give you the authoritative word, we'll give you the Bible, every word of the Bible is literally true. You don't have to think anymore, you don't have to research or read, will tell you what to do, and will tell you it's in the Bible, even if it's contradicted or it's really not. And they're doing the same thing with the constitutional originalist. So right now, there is a move underway in states controlled by Republican state legislatures, that are going back to articles of the Constitution and claiming that in a presidential election, the legislature's can overturn the will of the voters in their states in the electoral college. And this push is happening as we speak. And as it happens, the majority 30 of our state legislators are controlled by the Republican Party. So this is creating a clear and present danger, because if they succeed in this approach, which is being advanced by groups that are part of the Council for national policy, one of them is Alec. One of them is the heritage action organization. Then we could get to 2024. with Trump as a candidate and the state legislatures Defining the outcome of the Electoral College, overturning the national election. And we've had this happen in different forms in past elections, never in this particular form. And I think that they're pushing so hard on this, because they realize that they have lost the popular vote, they've lost public opinion in the United States, their measures are not popular with the majority of the public. And with good reason. I mean, they're very anti LGBT, they have been Islamophobic. they've they've wanted to deny civil and political rights of many people in society and and basically, American culture have gone in the other direction. So by seizing power through these manipulations of our political system, which has many cracks and flaws, from our history,

they, they are making a desperate attempt to seize control of the government and all three branches of government. And if that happens, it's game over for the rest of us, it will not be recuperated certainly in my lifetime.

Great. Thank you. And so can you tell us what is it about the clinton Trump election that made you interested in turning your investigative focus towards the US?

Well, I had spent a few years running the international program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. And, you know, we are dangerous to call it the Cathedral of journalism. And so as we went into that election, I noticed that the New York Times was saying that Hillary Clinton had, you know, over a 90% over 95%, probability of winning, and I said, All right, that's, that's the New York Times newspaper of record. I noted that 99 out of the 100, top newspapers in the United States had endorsed Clinton. And in the past, that was a powerful statement. So when Trump won, and I watched the New York Times election meter over election night, I said, All right, all of these highly intelligent people that surrounded me. I'm still connected to Columbia, but not at the journalism school. We've gotten something really wrong here. And I started connecting it to some media experiences I'd had in my hometown, in my hometown in Oklahoma, where I heard fundamentalist radio stations taking very overtly political positions, as I was driving through town, and telling people that Hillary Clinton was a demon. And later that beta O'Rourke was the son of Satan. And having having worked in a tax exempt nonprofit, before I thought, Oh, well, these churches aren't paying taxes, they're not supposed to be active in terms of political campaigns. That's, that's not our tax law. So that's, that's what started me on pulling the threads of this. And what has emerged over the last, you know, four or five years of research is that we've got this convergence of what I would call bad actors, in which q anon goes to the fundamentalist churches and reaches the congregants through their social media. And when Facebook and Twitter tried to crack down on it in sometimes feeble ways, they move back on to telegram, they move on to sub reddits. And they develop these communities. And as as, as Pamela pointed out, these are people who don't want policy talk from Hillary Clinton, they want emotion, it can be rage, it can be outrage. And and the crafters of the messaging are very skilled at generating messages and focus group testing messages that generate this rage and the sense of, of being being mistreated by the intellectuals, the coastal elites, all of these enemies that they put on their list. And of course, many of these enemies are the people who promote fact based evidence based learning. So if universities are the enemy, and the news media is the enemy, and Dr. Fauci is the enemy, and science is the enemy, then you have them not only supporting these political agendas from what they think is a religious basis, but also opposing rational climate policy, and opposing the COVID measures that would protect their own lives.

And this is so powerful and what what do you see, back to the question we asked Pam as some of the underlying causes that allowed the right to become so powerful, so is Is it just that they formed a better network? Or did the traditional local media breaking down the marriage of fundamentalist religion? new funding sources? Like how would you break down your version of the stew that got us to this point?

Well, in my book, I talk about a memo that was overseen by one of the architects of the movement, Paul wyrex. And one thing that really struck me about it was that this was this was decades ago. And he said, we're losing public opinion. So we have to take over different institutions in society, we have to take over entertainment and education. And, you know, he just reeled off a whole list. And they have resolutely and very strategically set about doing this. So when they look at swing states, that the national media doesn't pay attention to very often, they go in and systematically take over media, take over local organizations and churches, and mobilize them over years and decades, in a complex strategy, that that plays on the the the flaws and the faults in our system that gives certain weight to the Electoral College, and to the Senate, that does not represent the general population. And I think that part of the problem is that the Democratic Party has been asleep at the wheel. It has allowed its state democratic parties to be weak and underfunded. And when I, when I gave a book talk in the Wisconsin Book Festival, one of the people in the audience said, I'm a democratic canvasser, and the Democratic Party was so certain that they were going to win Wisconsin for Hillary Clinton that they didn't even send us campaign literature to hand out door to door. And I've heard this in various places. So, you know, I think that part of the problem is that these very intelligent people in New York and Washington and Los Angeles don't spend enough time thinking about these other states. And first of all, that's wrong from a representational point of view. And second of all, it's strategically disastrous, because it's allowed the republicans to not only take over the state legislatures, which they've done, but they've also really steamrolled the appointment of state level judges. So you've got a whole generation of ultra conservative judges in place in these states that are waiting to try these gerrymandering cases and these voter suppression cases. And we'll see how it plays out. They've spent a lot of energy briefing Trump on which federal judges to appoint and part of the deal that they struck with Trump, which Dave droite alluded to his allowing organizations that were connected to the council for national policy, including the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the natural National Rifle Association, to present Trump with a list of acceptable judges. And we saw the results come out in the Supreme Court. So we have a lot hanging in the balance right now. And they have worked on many fronts, they've worked very systematically. And I think that the Democrats have been somewhat reactive and somewhat poorly informed about what has been going on in these states. And I should add that part of the problem is also that we had a collapse a colony collapse of our professional news media in a lot of states after 2008 when a very large number of our newspapers on a local level went under, we lost a third of our state house reporters. So we're now creating information vacuums in many counties of the United States. And these fundamentalists and right wing and right wing talk radio organizations on their social media platforms have been moving in a rapid speed to fill the vacuum.

Great, thank you. For those listening. This is imagination action. We're recording this. You can listen to the show when we posted. Thank you, everyone. Next week. I also want to foreshadow, we're going to do a show on the ocean. Jeff Marlowe, who has started studying deep sea microbiology labs at BU, where he's researching immense diversity and global importance of extreme microbes is going to be speaking. He's also a journalist for The New Yorker. And Julian de Marius is an astrobiologist at SETI in Berkeley. And together they'll have a discussion about astrobiology. oceans in searching for life beyond Earth, but that's not tonight. Tonight we're talking about cults, disinformation and undermining of democracy. And we're getting there. We're excited to have an open discussion among our panelists. So, Alison, I think we have three more questions to end. Europe.

Yes, actually, I mean, this is my last one to add. And then maybe we can have some audience questions and then go to questions. So the whole group, but in what you're saying is, is so incredible. And it does seem that, given the stakes that are at issue that there isn't enough tracking and information sharing? I mean, who are the groups, if any, that you feel are tracking this adequately, that listeners on clubhouse who want to support them could be supporting? I mean, suppose we wanted to take all this very helpful information that you and the other speakers have developed and do something hopefully, in the nick of time? What? How would you see putting a responsive coalition our tracking service together?

Well, in terms of information, I'm impressed with the work of the Center for Media and democracy. They've done first rate research, right wing watch has also done very, very strong research on these movements. It's been taking a while to make its way into the national press. As Dave Troy mentioned, in terms of, of nonprofits that are trying to preserve American democracy, I can named three one is called partnership for American democracy. One is called issue one. And their website is issue one. That's one word.org. And that's, that's a combination of Democrats and Republicans who are concerned about these power grabs in our system. Another one is stand up Republic, and their website is stand up republic.com, I have to say that I am an academic, and I'm an analyst and authors. So I see my role as to just continue reporting on these developments as I see them. And a at this point, you know, some of my colleagues, you know, call it whack a mole, because there's so much going on on the state level. And I would recommend that the listeners who are interested, follow everybody on this panel on Twitter, because there's a lot of research that's shared and circulated in that forum.

Well, let me ask the other speakers about the same question. I mean, Dave, and Spencer and Steve and Pam, I mean, if we were to try to put something together, you know, to go up against this whole shadow network? Who's started that? Who would you support? What would that look like?

I can weigh in briefly on this, I mean, the challenge was sort of putting together like, you know, one entity, one group to rule them all is that it's very, very difficult to get anybody to agree on what the goals are. So that's kind of one challenge. The other thing that I think that is lacking is that this kind of awareness, this kind of movement, does need some like funding, because a lot of us are doing this stuff just for free, because we care about not losing our country, and, you know, not frying the planet, so we're just doing stuff, because we can, and, but we're not necessarily all being compensated for this stuff. And so there needs to be more, you know, coordinated philanthropy to support some of these efforts, what I've kind of found tends to work is that, you know, there's a network of networks of people that are fighting this stuff. And those networks each independently have their own sort of focus and their own point of view, but they're all broadly coordinated, kind of like what Dan was identifying with, you know, the council for national policy, having all of these associated networks, there's a lot of that kind of stuff already happening. And I feel like that we need to amplify more of those efforts. We didn't make it so that people who already have like good stuff going can continue to do it and not become burned out either financially or, you know, emotionally. And, you know, it's an incredible lift, really, to kind of meet the challenge because we're, we're really coming out of quite late, you know, as Anne said, this has been going on on the sort of other side for decades, and they've kind of got a lot of stuff in place and the, you know, the realization of just kind of what we're dealing with is just kind of just now sinking in, in some ways on the other sides of this. So it's, it just needs, you know, a lot more attention and I think People need to, you know, kind of have also a better conception of what's, you know, actually happening. And I think that conversations like this are helping to spread that, but we need to do a lot more. Great. Thanks, Dave. So, in a moment, I want to ask all our speakers, what are the signs that most concerned each of you about our threat to democracy today in the US, but before you tackle that, and I'd love to go around and hear from all of you. We have some great people on stage. Want to see, you know, thank you, Nikki, and Daniel for asking or making comments, equity news. canol. Cory, I think you had a, or I think Corey had a question, but maybe had to go, Eric. I think its own only Do any of you have a question you'd like to ask? And maybe if you can ask it. And we'll do like three questions in a row. And our speakers can kind of dabble in answering them. So if you can concisely, ask a question or make a statement on this topic, that would be great. So I'll go to equity Muse first.

Yeah, thank you very much. This is an absolutely fascinating discussion, loved it. And Mike, my question is the big, hairy audacious questions, I like to speak here and issues questions. And that is, how can we use our understanding of cults and have self righteous fundamentalism, to not only deconstructed but more importantly, how can we co design an equitable return to the sustainable future? How can we flip from the focus on the problem? to one of the solution? I think this is a question that needs a whole session to itself, but I just wanted to raise it, because most of this has been talking about the problem. And we and we need to understand that to deconstruct it. But more importantly, we have to co construct a better future. So that's my question.

Great, thank you. So just going, you know, to our speakers, if you can just write that down. Let's go to canol. You've been a great champion of this show. Anything you want to say at this point? Or should I just go to the next question?

No, I, I, this is probably one of the most fascinating conversations I've been in, in years, because I actually myself have been, interestingly enough, involved in certain cults, and disinformation. And so I just love everything about this conversation. My question would be, you know, we often vilify the Right, right. But there's also a large portion of the left to, in my humble opinion, that also have the same problem. So what would be in your experience? Something that would help heal this, you know, this, this fracture, humanity, like, as experts, I'd love to hear from any of you what would be either that silver bullet or for a better union and future?

Don't all jump at once.

Your new show canal? Thank you. And I know you've been in a lot of conversations. So to say this was one of the more interesting ones is says a lot. So speakers are imaginators. If you can write that down, and then only or Eric, do you have anything you want to say?

Yes, this is only speaking. I just wanted to comment a little bit and come up with a question in regards to spirituality and the cults that we're seeing pop up within the yoga communities I Alaska communities. I've been studying narcissistic abuse about seven years, and I'm studying social psychology. And I noticed this is a huge problem and people that we're primarily you would think on the left has moved extremely far right? on there's actually a podcast called can spirituality that talks a lot about on COVID deniers and the gaslighting that goes on. So, you know, as someone that has studied intensively cluster B personality disorders, I know that there's really no speaking to people that are abusive, to come out with an outcome. That is an outcome that helps everybody because you just get run in circles. So how do you push back on disinformation when people in cults and just information communities have strong traits of abusive personalities?

Thank you. Finally. And then Eric, do you have anything you want to say? Oh, Lord, where to start? Actually, I've

got a ton of notes. And I don't want to blow up your whole episode with it. But I'm gonna start off by saying that I'm coming at things from a very different angle than most of y'all are. Y'all come from like academia. And I'm a little bit more rural than that, we'll just say, but my first experience started back in the 80s. With the Titanic panic, when being only has to do in the county pretty much got my house with every everybody in the mother's cat. And I guess I've been fighting ever since. My primary question. And the most important question I wish to direct to all the panelists, is we talked a lot about cults and I have done my own operation that yes, because I've just been woven in for a long time. We all talk about how cults recruit, they talk about how they keep the members. And I do not believe that there is a distinction between a political cult and a religious cult, they all predate on the same weaknesses. Anybody can be recruited, if they're caught at the right vulnerable time with the right pitch. But coming back around all this research, I'm not finding anything on how these cults decompose, what causes them to explosively unwind? As we look into everything from the scop, skis in the Russians to to the wingmakers, or, you know, any of the two dozen other groups we can mention, right? offhand. There's a certain pressure point that it's obvious that occurs or something like a schism that occur most often it's usually between a leader and a lieutenant. But what other factors will cause these groups to supposedly decompose will unwind just, you know, explode, because we've seen it happen. But what's been going on behind it is driving that's actually with vital importance right now in the cars. And I got other stuff you want me to kick in, but I don't want to blow up your whole thing?

No, Eric, thank you for that comment. And then we'll just see a perona. Did you have a question you want to ask?

Yeah, I actually think, first of all, as always, thanks to canal for pulling me on stage. I think Ana Lee actually was pointing exactly what I was thinking of which is being here in LA and spirituality is a great podcast and Derek, and my questions slash, I guess, comment, had a lot to do with some of the language that some of these cultist disinformation purveyors use about clean data. And the idea that, especially the obvious part, especially with an on as one of the speakers of this, that journalism is inherently tainted, and that there's that idea of not necessarily satellite, far right, or far, whatever types of media sources of information, but that only the individual can be trusted. And how does that even work? Because effectively, these groups do kind of hang together as a network. So I just kind of wanted to bring up that decentralized yet aggregating kind of force and how how we in media can do something about it.

Great. So let's, let's go to the imaginators. You know, I post a question at the beginning, about what are the signs that most concern you about our threat to democracy today in the US, but, you know, maybe you could touch on what what some of the audience members have said, and get to that question, or maybe we wait. And have you guys comment on what the thoughtful people who just joined the stage said?

I can. There were so many things such a rich discussion, but I want to start, I guess by saying for me, the big paradigm shift is making it illegal to deceive and mind control and enslave another person for labor trafficking or sex trafficking work. And the law is about 100 years out of date. And that's why I did my doctoral dissertation and I put a copy up on freedom of mind calm for anyone who wants to know about that. I definitely think we should ask for open hearings in Congress to discuss the points that we're discussing. And in particular, we can address Q and on Dave, to dismantling q anon for Ted TEDx Mid Atlantic that I was honored to be part of. We need to get out of the binary and the all or nothing and the black and white thinking we need to get understand we're living in a complex system, and that they authoritarian mind controllers. Want to keep everyone confused. Want to do a firehose of Prop aganda, one undermine little legitimacy of experts and institutions and naming it and understanding. For example, fourth generation warfare, which is a psychological warfare is crucial for us to be able to have that picture that Dave was so accurately describing. And, and, and pan as well. I want to say malignant narcissism is the personality disorder of, of cult leaders. And trying to argue or persuade someone with facts never works in facts, it backfires. And what I've been seeing for years is family members and friends who have a loved one in the cult of Trump or any other cult, the last thing you want to do is yell at them and call them names and cut off from them, because it sends them deeper down the rabbit hole. Whereas if you adopt the loving, respectful dialogue, teach me helped me understand not that you want to believe it, but you want to understand and enter into an interaction. And lastly, I want to say that there, there is ways to scale this. But as Dave said, We need a lot of people pulling together, we need kind of like a Manhattan Project level with urgency, as Anne was speaking about six months as being a critical window that we have right now. But we have millions of former cult members in America and around the world. And if we educate and organize them, and they each start talking to five or 10 people that they know, we could do a big change thing going on. So I am optimistic, except we really have to work in a strategic way understanding that the forces of authoritarianism is a global problem. It isn't just the US. And it's really the authoritarians versus people who love human rights and democracy. So we can pull together and there are left wing cults and right wing cults, as I write about in my books, and on my blogs.

Thank you. I can continue if you like just to keep things moving along. First, I

wanted to just say what Greg questions is where from everybody that participated. And, you know, I

think that the theme that I see within all of those is really one of human connection. And if any of you are familiar with the work of Johann Hari has, he's got a book called chasing the screen, which was about addiction. And then another book about depression, what he identified was that this, there was kind of a social connection disorder that seems to be permeated our culture right now, where people are just not well connected in with networks that really have meaning to them. And they're becoming alienated for a variety of different reasons. And, you know, that's leading to these kinds of, you know, depression and addiction and those kinds of things, which end up being part of the ways that people are being pulled into these more radicalizing networks, because they're attempting alternative to something they're not finding very satisfying in their, in their everyday lives. And so these things are all interrelated, and the kind of frame that I'm beginning to put together around this, which is a work in progress. But you know, some of you may have thoughts on, I'd be happy to be in touch with you. And that is this idea of social capital within networks, the connections that tie us together. And you know, really what we're talking about is trust here, the people that you are closest to the people that you would leave your kids with, I mean, those are your tightest social connections. And then we have all of these parasocial connections as well online that are sort of starting to erode those more human, deeper connections that we might have with people who maybe aren't exactly like us, but that we managed to respect and get along with anyway. And so, you know, when you talk about how do we use the tools that courts utilize in order to create a solution, the biggest problem is that we have failed to document and measure social connection. That's really kind of what it boils down to. Because if you look at a map of relationships between people, you know, really liked the thoughts and lines kind of graph. What you find automatically is that most of the information in that representation, and in that, you know, set of relationships in real life rests in the relationships. It's not about the people. And the American bias towards individualism has made us blind to connections that tie us together. And so we tend to look at a roomful of 10 people as 10 individuals, instead of looking at the complex web of relationships that exists between them, which in fact comprises most of the information about those 10 people. Okay? So this is the problem, this is the issue is that we are neither measuring, or managing. And we all know from business, whatever that, you know, the things that you don't measure you can't manage. And so we need to get much better about figuring out how our society is being manipulated in terms of relationships, we don't have great data for that, we're gonna have to rely on proxies, such as social media data and surveys and samples, and we need to figure out how we're going to do that. That is what we need to do. Because ultimately, what we need to do is to get our country back into a healthier social configuration, where we have these cross cutting social relationships that, you know, connect people of diverse points of view and such ways that they've come to respect each other. Now, we have had this before, in the United States, and in other parts of the world, because of accidents of history. You know, if you look at what happened in World War Two, when soldiers have very different backgrounds, from different, you know, social classes, or whatever went off, and mixed from different geographies, they came back, and they realized that they respected each other, they did form tight bonds between people from New York City, and from Iowa City and from Alabama.

But today, we've been running our little machine here, a little society machine for the last 75 years without much of that kind of mixing. And in fact, not only have we had not much of that kind of mixing, we've been increasingly separated by a variety of mechanisms, such as educational institutions that tend to function more like brand names that convey status, and that separate us further geographically that separated us further by the common class and all of that in my race. And so we really need to knit the country back together. And so you know, you talk about what makes cults explode? Well, it's that altering of the social structure and Steve, have work to identify, you know, the specific kinds of triggers that can get that social structure to blow up. But you know, it's it's reconfiguring the social structure, and doing so meaningfully. So one of the things that identifies a potential solution, or at least a potential thing that would move us in the right direction is to greatly increase, say, like national service programs. And these don't need to be military service, although those could be good.

They could, you know, be social programs, that could be things that you know, where people are teaching in schools or getting together and doing conservation work, whatever it is, and they're building cons between people that aren't like them. And the key thing that we need to do, as part of such expansion of those kinds of programs is to measure exactly the relationships that we're creating, that will help rebalance the country and cause us to become a more resilient country and

get it right now, we're very fragile to outside manipulation. That's partly because we're so brittle, in terms of our social structure.

So if we weren't there today by General McChrystal about this and, you know, when I think of service, I think of, you know, helping with literacy helping with, you know, the Conservation Corps back to FDR, but you're showing that it could be a way to bridge people that aren't talking to one another, and, and help help help create foundational things for a democracy, I think, it's really interesting. I think this is a long form journalism. And usually our shows are two hours, we did one that was three hours, this is going longer. So this is what I suggest. Let's do reverse order, have each of our speakers starting with and then Pam, just say a closing comment, they can draw upon what some of our audience members asked or said, but share what's on your mind. You each are giants in the field, you know, doing such thoughtful work. And then, as tradition, Allison will kind of summarize some of the themes. And this has been recorded, a transcript will be ready with this. And I know there's a lot of people who are interested in this topic and and we're excited to have this out in in in, in the public, you know, to be a reference for some ideas that we think deserve. margination deserve action. So turning to you. And to kind of lead us here, and then and then we'll just go till Allison does a summary. And thank you.

Sure, I'll be brief. The emergency that is immediately before us is over the next six months as various state Are are implementing projects that serve to undermine the democratic electoral process. And people need to keep an eye on those states and look at every legal and civic action that can be taken to preserve our electoral process. And I would point them towards Arizona and Florida and Michigan and several other states at this special importance. But we're going to see this push, continue to go on over the next six months. And I think the future of the country is at risk. So this is a clear and present danger. in the longer term, I agree that we need to knit our culture back together, we need to talk to the people that are considered opponents and engage, not ridicule. And listen, not preach. I think that a lot of the people I grew up with in Oklahoma feel that they're being looked down upon. And and often that's the case. And I think that the more that we can establish the idea that we're not competing victimhood, we have common interests, many of us have children, we want a future we want to plan it. And the more we can steer things towards the self interest, that that is a common interest and finding common trusted sources of information and invest in them heavily in the areas they need it. That's going to be the medium term step forward.

Spencer, Pam, do you have thoughts?

I don't have much to add, I this has been a fantastic conversation. And I you know, I'd love to just like

continue to continue through the evening, if we could, but we can't. The only thing that I would add would really be something I was thinking about, as Dave was talking about, because I'm also a huge proponent of measuring in order to fix. I do think that we have, we probably have a huge crisis of scale that we're unaware of. It's incredibly cheap to manufacture false information and incredibly expensive to flood the system with real information that is well researched and well sourced. And I do think, you know, I look back on the moment where we figured out that there was many fake Twitter profiles, as there were citizens of the United States. And it was this very discreet, measurable amount of data. And all of a sudden, we were able to tamp that down a bit. And I think we do have to find a way to measure particularly how much disinformation there is out there as a proportion of the information that we're exposed to every day, and find a way to quantify it, and then really upscale the funding to match what's needed to equal or, obviously surpass, the tsunami that we're exposed to right now.

Thank you, Pam. Spencer, do you have thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, I, I don't have much more to add. But the one thing that several of the speakers said, important to have

empathy,

towards our, you know, in, in the separate reality, because they're victims, for the most part, some some perpetrate. But most of them are victims. And, and I think it's important to understand how people fall into that, what they are missing in their lives. And it could really happen to anybody. It really can. At any time, maybe not on the kind of scale that you think, but we're all susceptible to it, and we can all we all as humans are, it's very important to, you know, have empathy towards people who are, you know, controlled and exploited, you know, including, especially in the political realm, and that could help maybe create a dialogue. Just one quick, you know, anecdote which is, I think, interesting, which is, you know, when I was talking to have it, there was a conversation that I was privy to with Rosie O'Donnell. She was talking about how she was some kids. I think I've mentioned this but her kids and neighbor across the street from her Trump supporters and she was calling gonna have dinner with them, even though that was like, total anathema to her. And she decided to do it. Because she said, You know, it's neighborly and you know, we have to sort of, you know, find some common ground here. And she wasn't gonna go and talk about politics. She wasn't going to talk about Trump, that wouldn't have been a pleasant evening. But just to connect, and I think, you know, is this the answer? for all our problems? Is there some way to do it? I mean, this is for the smart people to figure out, but that's just on a gut level. What I think,

Wow. Well, john knows, at the end of every show, I try to hit some salient points and wrap it up. This isn't really a show that lends itself to that. So many pages of notes, I really feel as as many of you have said that this could be a whole show series in and of itself. But just so we don't lose some of the richness that the the five of you and Cory shared tonight, let me take a stab at it. Knowing that I will miss as much as I put in here. So the topic tonight was cults disinformation and the undermining of democracy. The focus of the session was how the deep need for community can form the basis of cults pockets of extreme thinking and manipulation. On a scale that I think did astonish all of us who attended tonight, we explored questions of cults from a deeply personal level, to how cult dynamics and manipulation play out on a national scale, and influence civil society. We started with Steve on what is a cult and Steve thinks about influence on a continuum from ethical to non ethical communities of influence. He described cults as entities that control thoughts, emotions, information and behaviors involving deception and manipulation and influencing your identity. Steve told us his powerful story that he was convinced to drop out of college, quit his job, donate funds become a right wing fascist and cut off from his family and came to believe that Reverend moon was the Messiah slept three to four hours a night. And the group's plan was to take over America the banking and education system and infiltrate Congress. He pointed out they haven't totally disbanded or given up that desire, and he got out of the cult during a hospital stay when he was away from the group. Spencer shared his story, working as a corporate lawyer working long hours, walking out of his first meeting with the cold but finding it great to have a very supportive group of people in what he said initially felt like honeymoon period. And not until the day after he left 23 years later, did he use the word cult or think of what he was in as a cult, it was a professional school. He described how very well educated professionals can be engaged in highly abusive relationships, people giving their life savings, forced adoptions, arranged marriages, money laundering, forced to recruit round the clock, and those were just some of the the things that that that he had to live with. We talked Dave then talked about what he called cult science, and a form of cultural engineering getting to the point where democracy at some point doesn't function. He pointed out that combining Advanced Micro targeting with artificial intelligence poses risks to very fragile democracies. He pointed out that people in groups that are more tightly connected and isolated from their original groups are much easier to manipulate. He pointed out that social media searches for and harvest issues that create reactions, which lead to amplification and cause even further divides. Dave said we have become a very brittle and resilient country, making us very vulnerable to authoritarianism. He also pointed out that medical and psychological data that's being available on the web is now able to identify vulnerable people.

Pam described as do with eight layers that lead us to what she called a deception or gaslighting epidemic. The first is a giant class divide, many people lost their homes and felt politically and profoundly wrong. Secondly, a line between opinion and fact has blurred. Third, a confusion on who is really an expert. The white coat phenomenon, fourth is retreating to partisan silos. Fifth is weaponization of the truth six is a mental health challenge. Which is very much on the line right now, seven is an identity, the disruption, and eight there's a COVID layer which really unmask the vulnerability, the different views on public health and all kinds of economic divides that are facing all of us. And Niki added an eighth layer to the cake or stew of a role for religion, the whole role, role of prophets and prophecies in all of this. So, Pam pointed out, it's cognitively far more demanding to be a critical thinker than to be loved, bombed or to be fed, and feed out angry stories. The speakers argued that we have always been but remain very vulnerable to manipulation. We don't realize how much money is flowing through the system or how extensive the networks are, that are coordinating messages. And Pam also talked about a gaslighting culture that denies reality and feelings, and how deep fakes could seriously advanced that when we have an ability to make it look like Hillary Clinton or one of our politicians as drunk.

Then we talked about and describe the convergence of networks, how very large groups that share very different interests are working together to share similar messages. In her book called shadow network, media money and secret hub of the radical right. She described how they've worked systematically on many fronts, and how this is all occurring on top of a colony collapse of the local news structure, we lost 1/3 of our state house reporters, creating information vacuums that right wing media and radio have moved into in a very quick way. And then also describe how it's almost a whack a mole project that so much is going on with attacks to democracy on a state level, that it's almost impossible to track all the policies. So all the speakers agreed that we need a big paradigm shift. And we also really need to have new metrics here. Steve described the need to make it illegal to deceive or to mind control, particularly leading to human trafficking, the need to get out of binary black white thinking and understand complexity, the need to understand fourth generation warfare that undermines experts, he described how malignant narcissism is a core personality of cult leaders, and that we need to adopt loving dialogue versus blaming. We need a lot of people pulling together what he called a Manhattan Project that could leverage former cult members and many others, to try to have one shared national discussion. Dave talked about a human connection disorder where people feel very alienated leading to depression and addiction, making the very vulnerable to cults and political extremism. He said the social capital is a networks and we fail to measure, document or manage our social networks that information flows. He said, America has a bias towards individualism which blinds us to the web of relationships that connect us, we need to better understand how our society is being manipulated, and possibly increasing national service programs that brings us all together for shared causes. And talked about the clear and present danger emerging over the next six months at state levels all across the country as electoral processes are being undermined systematically, with a focus on Arizona, Florida and Michigan, but involving up to 30 states. And you can also look at the the whole California Gavin Newsome as an example of the control battles being fought over California at the moment. She said, it is a clear and present danger and the future of the country is at risk. She also said we need to listen and not preach and look for common interests like actually wanting a planet and a future for our children. Pam mentioned the huge crisis of scale, that it's incredibly cheap to manufacture false information, but very expensive to provide clear information that straightens that out. She talked about the need for important metrics, like the fact that we have as many fake Twitter profiles as citizens we have in the US. And once we can see dimensions we can respond to it. She said we need to figure out a way to upscale funding to equal or surpass the tsunami were exposed to now. And lastly, my takeaway from all of this is the power of the need for community and belonging and networks. And I like canal's point that maybe on the left we have so much fighting that there isn't very much community or appeal or common networking and when I read Ann's book on shadow networks, I think there's a huge opportunity to just better organize the people in this country that deeply, deeply care about democracy. But most of all, I want to thank Corey, our five speakers, all of you who have just devoted so much of your time to really understanding what's happening in the shadows. That is so much going to influence where we go in the next five to 10 years. Thank you all.

Thank you, john. Thank you, Alison. And we'll see you all next week. Thank you so much. Yeah, see you all next week. God bless everyone. Thank you. Good night. Good night.